A Sea Queen's Sailing

by Charles W. Whistler

So we went steadily for a long way, and then we came to a place where the rocky walls of the channel nearly met, so that one could have thrown a stone from the deck on either as we passed. High up on the left cliffside a little light glimmered, for a cottage hung as it were on a shelf of the mountain above us. The measured beat of the oars sounded hollow here as the sheer cliffs doubled their sounds. Some man heard it, and a door opened by the little light, like a square patch of brightness on the shadow of the hillside.

Then he hailed us in a great voice which echoed back to us, and one of the pilots answered him cheerily with some homely password, and we saw his form stand black against his door for a moment before he closed it, and he waved his hand to the friend whose voice he knew. The pilot told me that it was his duty to listen for passing ships thus and hail them. Beside his hut was piled a beacon ready to light if all was not well, and in the hut hung a great, wooden cattle lure wherewith to alarm the town. We were close to it now.

By this time it was as if I knew the place well, so often had Gerda told me of it. The fjord opened out from this narrow channel into a wide lake from which the mountains fell back, seamed and laced with bright streams and waterfalls, and clad with forests, amid which the cornfields were scattered wherever the rocks gave way to deeper soil. At the head of this lake, where a swift salmon river entered the fjord, was the hall, set on rising ground above the clustering houses of the town, and looking down over them to the anchorage and the wharf for which we were making. Behind the hall rose a sheer cliff, sheltering it and the other houses from the north and east.

All this I was to see plainly hereafter. Before me now in the dusk, which was almost darkness, as the ship slid from the narrows into the open, was the wide ring of mountains and the still lake, and across that the twinkling lights of the town, doubled in the water below them, and above them all the long row of high-set openings under the eaves of the hall itself, glowing red with the flame of fire and torches, and flickering as the smoke curled across and through them.

I wondered what welcome was waiting for us from those who were gathered there, as I stood with Gerda on my arm beside our comrades, who watched the pilots as they steered. Bertric was there, and Phelim, who by this time spoke the Norse well enough, besides Asbiorn.

There was some spur of hill between us and part of the town, for the light seemed to glide from behind it as we held on, but its mass was lost in the shadows. I was watching the lights as they came, one by one, to view, and then of a sudden, on the blackness of the cliff above the hall, shone out a cross of light, tall and bright and clear, as it were a portent, or as set there to guard the place. So suddenly did it come that I started, and I heard Father Phelim draw in his breath with some words which I could not catch.

"What is that?" I asked Gerda, under my breath and pointing.

She laughed gently, and her hand tightened on my arm.

"We were wont to call it Thor's hammer," she said. "We see it from time to time, and it brings luck. Now it greets me and you--but it is not the old sign to me any longer."

"It is strange," said Bertric. "Once you called on Asa Thor--and here is that one to whom you called, and yonder--"